The big cookie drop of 2024 officially began in January with Google’s initial release of Tracking Protection for Chrome users.
Any PPC marketer caught off guard by this either hasn’t been paying attention to the signals for several years or hasn’t put the pieces together to create a cohesive strategy in response, or both.
As an agency marketer, I’ve been in a position to help dozens of brands formulate an approach to life after third-party cookies.
Whether you’re looking for an overall strategy or need guidance on which high-leverage initiatives to prioritize, I can confidently say that you’ll be way ahead of the curve if you tackle these three projects right away:
Here’s why every project is vital in a world without third-party cookies.
1. Website design: Audit your use of third-party cookies
Google has provided a useful point of reference (including the images below) so that sellers can be guided about the phasing out of cookies.
For this step, we will focus on the second phase of this page: Audit of your use of cookies.
Google’s literature is a useful reminder of a couple of angles to the phasing out of third-party cookies that go beyond tracking:
Usability issues lurk everywhere if you don’t control your site’s content and embedded widgets. (Check out that “add to calendar” feature!) Even if you have your own cookies set, consistent use of the right code is important to smooth your site’s behavior across browsers.
Yes, you need to focus on improving cookie-free targeting and analytics, but don’t put the cart before the horse: a website that works.
Dig deeper: PPC outlook: How advertisers can stay ahead in 2024
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2. Data integration in the platform
OK, now about that tracking and reporting. Major ad platforms have given advertisers ways to improve reporting on the platform and help bidding and targeting algorithms find high-quality users.
Google: Integrate offline conversion tracking
Whether you rely on digital ad campaigns to help drive offline B2C conversions (think: car dealerships) or to generate B2B leads, it’s critical to your understanding of campaign performance—and your performance future, integrate offline conversion tracking (OCT). or offline conversion data, in your Google campaigns.
In terms of reporting, adding OCT brings a critical level of nuance to the value your campaigns generate.
Instead of quoting a large number of leads and exchanging them with your peers, integrate your CRM data to understand how many of those leads went through the funnel at stages like MQL, SQL, SAL and Opportunity.
The benefits are huge. You will:
Find areas to cut without compromising your pipe. Identify high quality lead sources where you should increase investment.
Campaigns that simply set bids for leads without using OCT to teach targeting algorithms how to find quality Prospects are giving Google a license to hunt down the easiest possible targets.
This will cause a lot of junk to be dumped into your CRM. Your CPL may go down, but your CPQL (cost per qualified lead) will likely suffer.
Dig deeper: 5 best practices for tracking offline conversions in Google Ads
Facebook: Embed the conversions API
Before Google began its cookie phase-out, Apple’s iOS 14 took a step out of Facebook’s conversion reporting, caused advertisers to leave or minimize the platform en masse, and lowered prices for Facebook actions.
In response, Facebook leaned into its own Conversions API (CAPI), which requires development work, but moves conversion tracking to your website’s server.
It doesn’t rely on cookie tracking and effectively gives you more accurate conversion tracking in an iOS 14 and post-cookie world.
This has the same benefits as Google’s OCT integration. You can:
Better understand campaign performance. (This applies to all verticals, including e-commerce). Use this data to train the bidding algorithm to find more valuable users.
LinkedIn: Incorporate CAPI
B2B marketers know the challenges of a long sales cycle with multiple conversion events and many stages of a lead.
CEO of LinkedInwhich follows the same principles as Facebook’s, is crucial to understanding the impact of advertising on the pipeline.
As for using offline data to train LinkedIn’s algorithm, LinkedIn’s algorithm is not as refined as Facebook’s (yet) to find the right users, but incorporating OCT is a good practice that it should pay off.
Geographic lift testing and media mix modeling (MMM) are two very different methods of tackling the same challenge: measuring incrementality, or the true value of your paid initiatives, regardless of tracking limitations based on clicks
These are practices we’ve been preaching long before the cookie phase-out, but introducing more tracking limitations makes them even more important to see an accurate picture of your campaign performance.
Increment testing, which divides audiences into test and retention (or control) groups to show causality in ad results, can take the form of geographic retentions, PSA testing, and so on.
Media mix modeling is a more technical approach that typically requires third-party software and pulls a large amount of data (we recommend at least two years) to determine performance correlations.
The pros and cons of each approach are broken down as follows:
Whatever their relative pros and cons, the main pro of the two big options for incrementality measurement is the same: you’ll know the value of your ad campaigns, with or without cookies.
Either way, all search marketers should spend time and budget measuring the true value of initiatives like:
Retargeting (where users might have converted anyway). Google brand search (branded keywords, often overrated). Unbranded Google search (more generic, often underrated keywords).
Learnings from these measurement exercises are likely to help refine your media mix and ultimately drive more revenue.
Over the years, we’ve seen many marketers develop a bias for direct response marketing that stems from cookie-based measurement.
This bias has typically ignored factors like the halo effect and devalues top-funnel KPIs like impressions and reach.
Ultimately, if opting out of cookies forces us to look at the whole picture instead of just relying on funnel metrics and last-touch conversions, we’ll be better off.
Deepen: efficiency vs. volume in PPC: 4 tips to achieve a balance in incremental conversions
Set up your marketing to succeed even without third-party cookies
If you don’t have analytics skills and haven’t thoroughly considered the data picture, these initiatives can cause some anxiety.
The good news is that they’re the way forward, and addressing them now will help future-proof your marketing as privacy regulations evolve.
Combine that with strong partner systems and a growing pool of solution providers, and it won’t be that difficult to carve a path through the cookie crumbs. But it’s time to move.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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